Oak Parkers who live along the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) are going to get another crack at voting on installing noise-muffling walls.
It’s all part of the Illinois Department of Transportation’s project to widen and improve that portion of the expressway from Mannheim Road in Hillside to Racine Avenue in Chicago and through Oak Park.
IDOT sent ballots to Oak Parkers living near the highway for their preference for or against the noise-muffling walls.
Response was poor, so IDOT officials want another vote.
“If we don’t get at least a 33 percent response rate in the first round, we do a second round of balloting,” IDOT spokeswoman Gianna Urgo recently told the Oak Leaves.
The second round of voting is this month. Results will be a factor in IDOT’s decision on whether or not to install the walls.
Reading about the situation in the Oak Leaves, I wondered whether this if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed-try-try-again method of voting might work in our general elections.
Let’s face it, voter turnout in America is a disgrace.
In the 2014 midterm elections, the national voter turnout was 36.4 percent. This was reportedly the lowest turnout in 70 years.
We are electing people to life-and-death offices based on what just about a third of eligible voters think
Close to two-thirds of potential voters don’t vote. How can we be satisfied with results of elections like this?
The people who don’t vote just have to take what they get by way of election results, you might say.
That’s true. But nonvoters aren’t the only ones to suffer when a minority of citizens pick our elected officials.
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Could the answer be a second round of balloting in which people who didn’t vote the first time get another chance?
An election would be declared completed when a certain percentage of eligible voters voted.
Multiple elections would be mighty expensive, time consuming and even more contentious.
So, what might work for anti-noise walls probably wouldn’t work for the infinitely larger problem of voter turnout.
Of course, there is a simple solution:
Hey, people who don’t vote – vote.
Paul Sassone is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.